Online community project by journalism grad students at Northwestern University

After a subsequent round of surveys, Team Crunchberry gathered new data on Internet usage rates from our user panel. From the survey we’ve gleaned that participation intimidation, one of the barriers we’d earlier identified, is not a significant factor for the Cedar Rapids area. We also eliminated the barrier “Comments lack are not valuable” choosing instead to investigate “Comments are not believable,” as it is a subset of the former, and since it is the more measurable problem to solve.

On Tuesday we finally hammered out a narrowed-down list of super-features and began actual development. Many hours were spent agonizing over eliminating some features and barriers from our wish list that we wouldn’t have the time to implement, but what we’ve ended up with is a (still over-broad) list of super-features and subordinate features that mitigate many of the barriers to strengthening communities of our target demographic in Cedar Rapids.

The subordinate features on the image above only represent a tiny portion of the overall list of features we’ve written, and that list continues to evolve as the iterative development process gets underway.

Due to time constraints we will not be able to accomplish everything on our narrowed super-feature list. We are not ruling any of this list out entirely, but to get the ball rolling we are beginning to develop two super-features: Comment Structure and Facebook integration.